If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary t...o fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself,... I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of the individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We can never part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands..., and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I... tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;Mthough I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who ma...kes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune ... in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent--for every effect a perfect cause--and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like ident...ical propositions.... Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »